Radiation -- while all around us -- can be lethal

Every day, when we turn our face to the sun, we get a little radiation. Where there are granite deposits near the earth's surface, there are radon isotopes escaping.

"That's the natural background radiation we don't think of," said Dr.

Joseph Belsky
, an endocrinologist at
Danbury Hospital
. "A CT scan or an X-ray at the hospital will give you radiation. TV sets give off radiation."
Belsky, 81, spent three years of his life -- from 1969 to 1972 -- studying the effects of radiation on human beings. He was the medical director of the
Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission
at the time.
Working out of a set of Quonset huts in Hiroshima, Japan, Belsky directed the study of the survivors of the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II in 1945. That study, funded by the U.S. until the 1970s, continues today.
The people Belsky studied lived within a few miles of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, where more than 200,000 people died as the result of two bombs.
What the work of the commission has continued to show is that now, more than 60 years after the event, the people who survived the bombs still suffer higher rates of many types of cancer -- leukemia, thyroid cancer, breast cancer, salivary cancer, lymphomas -- than those never exposed to the radiation.
Belsky said prostate cancer is one of the forms of cancer that men exposed to large amounts of radiation are more at risk of getting. But it's also a common cancer, especially among older men.
Belsky said the two bombs in Japan did not create any cancers never seen before or any new diseases. They did not damage people's immune systems or cause infertility. The next generation of babies born to survivors did not have any unusual rates of disease.
The bombs did not cause premature aging.
Belsky's work was part of a methodical epidemiologic effort to learn the effects of the bombs on human beings.
In contrast, the U.S. did not study its atomic war veterans of the 1950s and 1960s after they left the service -- or even let them talk about their experiences openly.
It's very difficult now -- a half-century after the events -- to know what the effects of living six months on an atoll, witnessing a couple of dozen of thermonuclear explosions miles away, might be.
Belsky said radiation travels in a straight line, getting weaker with distance. The servicemen in the Marshall Islands who witnessed A-bomb and H-bomb tests from 10 or 20 miles away should not have received a dose high enough to harm them, he said.
But if they lived with the radioactive fallout from those bombs -- as Southbury resident

Wayne McCormick
see main story did in his six months on Eniwetok Atoll -- that could complicate the medical issues involved, Belsky said.
And, he added, environmental factors -- for example, smoking cigarettes -- add to the risks of radiation exposure. And some people could simply be more prone to becoming ill after getting a dose of radiation -- a dose that might not bother another.
"I'm sure there would be a rare susceptible person out there," he said.